


Queen of Peace

by helenblackthorn



Category: Dark Artifices Series - Cassandra Clare, Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Family, Family Feels, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 03:20:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4690274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helenblackthorn/pseuds/helenblackthorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which not everything is so black and white for the girl with the ears like knives</p><p>or; Helen remembers living in Faerie, but she does not remember much of her mother, and she has questions for her father that she isn't sure are better left unanswered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Queen of Peace

Helen remembered.

The memories were dull, a faded light in the back of her mind, just barely lit and visible. But they were there all the same; sometimes she would relive them through her dreams, and the memories would flash like lightning when her eyes opened again, and then they got darker and darker until she could no longer see them as clearly - like murky bay water after a storm, or a cracked cell phone screen with missing shards of glass.

The last time she had stepped foot in Faerie she was fifteen and working a case with her tutor, Katerina. The world had changed and warped around her and Helen felt the veins beneath her skin warm like slowly boiling water, had remembered the time when she was six and listened to tales told by the mermaids of the lake. Helen could not remember the fables they had told at all, but she could see, vaguely, the way their smiling mouths moved as they talked, the slated gills on the sides of this necks, how their voices were like music to her ears and their tails glimmered in the sun. Mermaids wore a beautiful innocence, but their eyes glinted with a terrible mischief, and if you looked close enough you could see the sharpened points of their teeth behind their lips.

She could remember her feet, tiny and bare, fleeting across the grass, dancing to a fiddles music beneath the constellations and the bright glow of the crescent moon. How she’d be chasing butterflies and playing  with pixies the size of fireflies and then the field would change to mountains and everything would be different but it  _wasn’t_ and it was beautiful.

And Helen remembered the Faeries of The Seelie Court, the  _Shining Thron_. How she had met a man with skin like ivy and hair the colour of the morning sky entwined with leaves, his fingers as thin as bark. Or the faerie woman with purple eyes and black hair to her ankles who had crouched down with a smile for Helen to place a flower crown atop her head; how she had kissed her cheeks and then danced away singing to the treetops with her human lover, her voice high and soft like silk.

The Unseelie Court faeries are some she had seen very little of during her time there that she could remember. Her mother had done a good job to ensure that, at least, as Nerissa was Seelie royalty. Helen had seen many though, as she grew older, for it was not all that uncommon. Their nails as sharp as talons, a world of darkness and mischief in their eyes, riddles that feel from their tongues like mouse traps.

Faerie was a dark and mischievous place, a realm that beheld terror and trickery that knew no bounds nor laws, and perhaps that was what made it so destructively alluring.

But through it all, these memories that flickered like broken light bulbs, Helen could remember very little of her mother. Her real mom, not her step-mother Eleanor who had loved Helen and Mark as if they were her own despite them being half-breeds, despite them being untrustworthy, despite them being timebombs for disaster and hurt.

Her father had woven her and her little brother terrible stories of her, had recited poems -  _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_  - until they memorized every line and stanza. Andrew had said as Helen grew older that Nerissa had looked like her. “You have her nose, and the shape of her jaw,” he’s said once, and Helen, at thirteen, could have sworn she’d seen a dark flash in her father’s eyes as if looking at his own daughter triggered memories of his horrid past in the land under the hill.

The only thing Helen knew of her mother was that she was a monster, a Faerie princess that had imprisoned her father and forced him to love her for seven years, had let her Uncle Arthur be taken and tortured by her sister. The only thing she remembered about her was the colour of her eyes, golden like a burning fire with swirls of red as bright as blood - and the platinum hair that fell to her waist, so similar to her own. She could not remember what she’d sounded like. When she looked in the mirror Helen saw her father’s eyes, saw the same dimple in her left cheek when she smiled that he had, and tried to put together the puzzle of the missing pieces of her mother in her own reflection.

Maybe that was why, she thought, Andrew could hardly look at her for very long. Maybe that was why he was always a little more reserved toward his half-Faerie children, as if he was waiting for Helen and Mark to follow in Nerissa’s footsteps, waiting for them to trap a ‘lover’ of their own.

Helen had never felt like a monster.

It was half of who she was, though, wasn’t it? Daughters often fell in the path of their mothers, after all - often became them as they grew up. So she could not help but wonder if it was festering somewhere within her, the fire beneath her skin; a caged animal behind metal bars that would rust and rust with time until it broke. The thought frightened her, just a little, because Helen knew there was good in her too. It was just a matter of what side won and what side lost, and there was no telling which would come out on top.

Sometimes she feared she would lose her heart to someone and that monster would emerge only then, that whatever man or woman she loved would fall into the same trap that her father had so many years ago. Helen did not want to deceive anybody, did not want to hurt anybody. And she trusted herself enough, at eighteen, that she wouldn’t…

Yet sometimes, the thought would trickle back into her mind, consume her for days, and she couldn’t help but wonder if her fate was as destructive in the end as her  dead mother’s was.

“Everything alright?”

Helen repressed a sigh and turned her head to face her father, who stood in the doorway of the kitchen with an easy-going smile on his face. They had the same one, the dimple included. Helen saw a lot of herself in her father, but she had never felt so different. She knew Mark had felt the same; he’d told her so. He had his nose and his jaw, the same shape of his shoulders.

Forcing a smile on her face to match his, Helen nodded and sat a little straighter, fingers curled around a mug of half finished coffee. Julian had painted a surfboard on it for her for her seventeenth birthday last year, and Drusilla had sloppily written “world’s #1 big sister” on it with light blue paint. Helen had been using it almost every morning ever since.

“Just thinking,” Helen said, watching him as he moved to pour himself a cup and dump five spoonfuls of sugar into it. Andrew turned and leaned his back onto the counter, taking a sip.

“Good thoughts?” He asked, “it didn’t seem like it. You  always have that gleam in your eyes when you daydream, like our little Dru. You seemed far away -”

“Like in another world?” She finished, averting her eyes to her mug. One of her fingernails scraped carefully against the side, not strongly enough to chip off the paint. She could feel her father’s eyes on her, could feel him scrutinizing her as though he could see right through her facade. Helen had built strong walls around herself long ago, when she’d been cursed at and insulted when her father had brought her along with him to Idris when she was twelve. It was not easy to see through her emotions when she didn’t want you to, and she preferred it that way.

Years and years of perfecting that through endless hurt made that possible.

“So are you going to tell me what’s really going on, Helen? I shouldn’t need to ask,” Andrew said with a sigh, “you should know you could talk to your father about what’s on your mind. Is it boy problems? Or girl problems -”

“ _Dad_ , no” Helen groaned, rolling her eyes. “It’s neither. There’s nothing going on, I promise. I’m just a little tired and I got lost in thought for a minute.”

“Oh,” he said, then took another sip of his coffee. “Did you have trouble sleeping last night?”

“Not really,” Helen responded shortly, rising from her seat and promptly dumping the rest of her coffee, long cold no doubt, down the sink. She placed the mug in the dishwasher and straightened her back, lips pulling into a faux grin. Her father was not easily fooled, so Helen was sure that she would never get away from his persistent questioning should she not make a run for it now. “I think I’ll head off to the beach for a little while,” she said, “I’ll bring the kids along if they want to come, take them off your hands for a little while.”

Andrew nodded, but only spoke again when she was already at the archway of the Institute’s kitchen. “You know you don’t have to keep hiding when something is wrong, Helen.” He said. Her father’s voice had hardened some over the years, since Eleanor had passed away - and sometimes that carefree, light tone would come back on the good days. She was not very used to him sounding so serious.

She paused in the doorway. She didn’t say anything, felt that there really was nothing to say, and did not turn around. Helen got the feeling in her gut that if she did he wouldn’t have been looking at her anyway.

“I know you think that you’re responsible for taking care of this family since Eleanor,” Andrew continued, “but you should remember that sometimes our job is to take care of you as well.” He sighed, and Helen heard him scoop more sugar into his coffee. “Have a good day at the beach. The waves look wonderful this morning. Perhaps you should bring along your board, teach Jules how to surf. He’s been wanting to learn, you know, and it’d be a nice break from weapons training.”

“Yeah, maybe I will,” Helen replied distractedly, staring down at her bare feet, a terrible guilt for lying to him coiling in her stomach. She steeled her shoulders then, turning back around to face him, eyes set and determined. “Do you see a lot of her in me?” She asked, and she wasn’t sure if she really wanted to know the answer, but it was too late to take it back.

Andrew’s head shot up. There was a flicker of confusion in his eyes, but it was slight, the dawn of realization passing across his face. Still, he questioned. “Who?”

“Mom,” Helen answered, fingers toying with the fabric of her pajama shorts as she clarified. “My  _real_  mother. Do you think I’ll end up just like her? Is that why you’re so…so cut off with Mark and I?”

Her father’s hand rubbed at the stubble along his jaw, his chest heaving with a long intake of air. His momentary silence built a bout of anxiety in her chest; Helen could feel her heart beat quick and fast in anticipation. She shouldn’t have asked. She should have just gone about her day. The thoughts would have left her alone eventually; they always had.

When his silence became too much, that bubble of anxiety in her chest burst, and she could not stop the words from coming from her mouth.

“I remember what it was like,” she said, voice wavering. “I’ve told Mark stories of nights I’d spent dancing with faeries and talking to mermaids and playing games with pixies. But I can’t remember her, not really. I can’t tell him what she was like. I know he wants to know. I want to remember for him, but I can’t, because I was too small. How is it that I can see memories of living in Faerie so easily but can’t remember what my own mother sounds like? Looks like?”

“Helen -”

“It’s not fair.” She hadn’t meant to cut him off, but she couldn’t stop herself. Helen was sick of holding it all back from him; it was more painful to not know, and while Mark understood, she needed her father to understand, too. “I don’t know anything about her but I, I  _miss_  her. And sometimes I miss the dancing and the mermaids and I know I shouldn’t I just -” Helen took a deep breath and wrung her hands together to keep them from shaking, “I just need to know. Do I remind you of her? Am I like her? Is Mark?”

The expression on Andrew’s face had not changed. Helen felt guilty for having brought it up at all; the last thing she wanted to do was make her father relive less-than-pleasant memories. She considered, for a moment, just telling him to forget it. Forget she had ever said anything so they could go about their day as normally as they could. But she didn’t.

“Your voice when you sing,” Andrew said finally, voice cautious, “is the same as Nerissa’s. Even having been bewitched it’s familiar: as light and fae-like as hers when she sung for the Courts, and just as enchanting. I see her in you, and I hear her in you, but I see my daughter more. Kind hearted and soft spoken and too selfless for her own good.”

He paused, and Helen said nothing, her heart beating fast and heavy against her ribs.

“Mark…he may not sing very well like you, but he takes to the wind as she had,” Andrew continued, looking thoughtful. “You know how your brother walks weightlessly, don’t you? How the breeze calms him more than any shore or book would. Nerissa,” whenever he says her name his voice hardens, just slightly, but enough for her to notice it, “Nerissa was as light as a feather. He has her eyes. I see her in him, too, but I see a determined son more, a Shadowhunter more. A warrior, like you. I do not see monsters, I see my children. My  _Nephilim_  children. Eleanor felt the same, loved you as if you were hers.”

“But do you resent us?” Helen asked, and her throat felt tight, her eyes stinging. Crying so easily must have run in the family. Little Drusilla was the same. Damn. “Even just a little bit?”

“Never,” Andrew said, voice softening. He lowered his cup onto the counter and approached her, a heavy hand placed onto one of her shoulders. Helen was fairly tall, but he towered over her still. Her brothers would, too, someday. “I could never resent you or Mark. You are my flesh and blood, and I love you both as much as I love the others. I wouldn’t wish either of you back in Faerie, not ever, and I would never wish you two hadn’t been brought here to us. This is where you belong.”

Helen bit her lip and nodded slightly, giving herself a moment for his words to sink in. A heavy intake of air passed her lips, settled into her lungs, and she held in for a brief moment. That confirmation was more than she had expected. “Okay,” she said finally, at a loss for what to say. “I didn’t want - I didn’t mean to upset you if I did. I’m sorry, I -”

“You apologize too much,” said Andrew, a gentle smile on his lips. He pulled her into his arms, and Helen fell into her father’s embrace and felt safe. “You have every right to want to know, and so does your brother. I’m sorry for never saying so beforehand, I should’ve.”

“Thank you,” Helen said quietly as she pulled away, wiping a stray tear from her cheek.

Andrew kissed her forehead before turning away, going to retrieve his cup of coffee and smiling at her. “Go on to the beach and try not to dwell on the past too much,” he said lightly, “I believe I’ll find Mark and have a chat.”

“He’s always so curious,” Helen commented. She felt a weight had been lifted from her shoulders, but the pressure of many more still bore down on her. She had a million questions she knew Andrew would not be able to answer. He had been cursed into loving her mother: there was not much he could tell her that she would want to hear.

“Yes,” he said, “I can understand why.”

“You know how I said I missed it?” Helen asked, but didn’t wait for him to comment. “Faerie, I mean. I really do. But I’m happy here in this life, and so is Mark, and I couldn’t imagine being without the kids. I just thought you should know that, too.”

Andrew’s smile remained. His eyes looked a world away, but for once he did not look unhappy. He said nothing, did nothing but nod in acknowledgement, before skirting passed her and down the hallway. Helen turned to follow him out and found the kids in the living room. Ty, with his stuffed bee dangling from his fingertips and listening to Livia intently. Jules playing with Tavvy and his alphabet blocks, Drusilla scribbling away in her dream journal.

Faerie had been a beautiful place, she thought, full of magic and life and colour that could not be matched by anything in this world.

But she would not trade this life with them to go back. She would not trade her siblings and her father and her time with Eleanor before she passed to have stayed in Faerie with her mother if she had been given the opportunity, and couldn’t dream of it.

Helen would bear the weight of that uncertainty of herself until she drew her last breath. But, Angel, it would be worth it.

She just knew it.


End file.
